Tuesday, October 11, 2005

granville street cartoons

My half hour of photo-taking on Granville Street last Friday provided me with so much good material to work with that I had to post a few here.

There was a man at Granville and Broadway, near Chapters, feeding the pigeons. I got quite a few shots of him, but nothing satisfactory, so I headed south. When I turned back for one last glimpse, I saw it from this angle, so I zoomed in close and with the garbage truck passing in the background caught this weird and wonderful compostition:

Up the street there was much less activity so I tried to capture the quieter feeling of this part of the neighbourhood.

The best part of this little detour from my Friday is that it's given me all kinds of ideas for future field trips.

These are really very nice, Andrea. They're great pictures in themselves, but the effect you put in them really brings them to life. Are you using photoshop? This looks like a posterize effect. Whatever it is, it works splendidly.

Well, since you asked... :) Actually, I discovered this special effect while using the very limited software (Kodak EasyShare)I used to use with my former digicam. There are no options for altering the colour balance or saturation (except a generic "enhance" feature), but there is this "cartooning" effect (hence the name of this post). It only works well with certain types of photos, though. I've tried it on everything from portraits to scenics and is really only effective for certain types of urban shots, like these. I did use it one a self portrait of me with one of my paintings and liked it so much that I added the result to the "about" page on my art website (see sidebar).